If you have never seen this, and this has never troubled your thoughts in any way, you do not need to read on. It's not important.

WHY ON EARTH DO YOU HAVE YOUR OWN MARKUP FORMAT?

The reason these artifacts exist at the front end is pretty simple.

We wanted to provide a single front-end interface where pop-ups did not have to go back and talk to the server.

We already have to display player information onscreen, so why go back and ask the server for new information when someone clicks a popup? Simply put, the way we've structured the extraordinarily database-driven Illy infrastructure means that it's far more efficient for us to present mostly redundant information to the front end up-front... than it is for us to ask multiple questions of the data on player demand.

Each descriptor of (eg) a player, town or location would contain, hidden in the UI, everything that the pop-up window needs onclick to display further information.

GOSH, THIS ALL MAKES AMAZING SENSE. WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT DESCRIPTORS?

I'm glad you asked.

There are a number of different formats used, depending on purpose.

The most common ones (and probably the only ones that need explanation) are:

[@p=] PLAYER

[@t=]TOWN

p=player, t=town.

Pretty straightforward, huh?

TOTES AMAZEBALLS INNIT. DOES U HAZ GRAMMAR?

There's a difference on the demarcator for 'owning' objects such as player and town.

You may get [@ps=] or [@ts=].

The additional 's' marks a grammatical possessive that, when displayed, marks the content as being used in the context of a genitive rather than a nominative, locative or accusative case.

DOES THE TOWN HAVE A WALL PART 2? (BOOL VARCHAR FOR SOME REASON ONLY TC UNDERSTANDS): wall (or blank if not)

TLDR;

There's some stuff that does some shizzle somewhere in the game that's hidden from view for most all players. It doesn't have anything earth-shattering in it; though my understanding of what some players think about handling "sensitive" data has been somewhat astonishingly amended as of late , so maybe what medal you display publicly is actually a closely-guarded military secret - I don't know anymore

If you skipped to this tldr; then you *really* didn't need to know.

Regards,

SC

Replies: Posted By: Tensmoor
Date Posted: 29 Apr 2016 at 00:22

Thanks for that SC. I'd managed to work most of that out but confirmation is always good